Many computer systems provide that users can generate electronic documents. The following are examples of such situations: a call center agent interacts with customers and generates standard sales orders, service orders, complaints, etc., based on those interactions; a back office agent or secretary fills out forms for a department; and a person fills out an electronic form on a web site. If the user is new or relatively inexperienced at filling out the form, typically the user interface provides guidance as to what information should be entered and where, for example through field explanations or help functions.
However, a user who has used the template (or a similar one) many times becomes familiar with its contents and structure. The user may know, even before launching the template, what fields are to be completed and in which order they come. These “advanced” users may find it cumbersome to enter the necessary information using the template structure that the user interface provides.
Moreover, the user interface may require the user to perform repetitive tasks to fill in the information. For example, the fields for entering the essential information may be spread among many fields on a complex screen. The user then has to move between the fields, for example by repeatedly pressing the tab key or by moving one hand from the keyboard to the mouse. Unless the user is willing to move back and forth between the fields, the information must be entered in the order defined by the user interface. The disadvantage in these situations is that the knowledgeable user may feel the user interface is slow or poorly configured because it does not let the user enter the essential information very quickly although the user already knows exactly what information is needed.
In some situations the user can work with several templates to perform various tasks in the system. The templates may be for closely related documents such as a sales order and a sales order quote, or templates for essentially unrelated documents such as an email and a calendar appointment. The user must always first open the correct template, and this is done in different ways depending on which template it is and the application program that generates it. For example, to generate a new email the user would perform steps that are significantly different from launching a new leave request or creating a sales order. The user may find it frustrating that there are such different ways of initiating templates for the common purpose of entering information for creating an electronic document.